The Server, the Son and the Holy Ghost / Tales from "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace"

Danya Ruttenberg, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, August 10, 1999

Used to be that getting to Heaven was quite an ordeal; you had to die, get wings and a halo, float up into the clouds, and then try to persuade St. Peter that you'd lived an unblemished life. These days, it's a little bit easier -- all you need is a modem and an ISP.

So says one recent book, anyway. In "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet," science commentator Margaret Wertheim studies the Internet in the context of religious history and considers the ways in which the 'Net might be seen as a cultural re-imagining of the New Jerusalem.

"The Pearly Gates" attempts to be both a history of physical and spiritual space and a cultural analysis of Internet theology. It succeeds marvelously at the former, using five chock-full chapters to explain how art and science have, in various ways, changed how we conceive theological and physical space. In the latter three chapters, it's unclear at times whether she's trying simply to define cyberspace as a new space, or whether she's trying to offer a deep cultural analysis of our Electronic Elysium -- but her points are often compelling nonetheless.

She argues that "today's proselytizers of cyberspace proffer their domain as an idealized realm 'above' the problems of a troubled material world. Just like the early Christians, they too promise a 'transcendent' heaven...a utopian arena of equality, friendship and virtue." The medieval and cyber realms both, she claims, allow people to transcend the body's limitations.

Both heaven and the 'Net thus create a complex, dualistic vision of self; though one version of us can exist in the material realm (butts firmly sitting in the ergonomic chair) another can spiritually ascend in a way. The mystics who "leave their bodies" during prayer aren't all that different from a guy who turns himself into a unicorn in an interactive multi-user dungeon (MUD).

It's an interesting idea, and Wertheim's parallels often ring true. America at the edge of Y2K has oft been compared to a declining Roman Empire, where political, cultural and moral life were rapidly on the wane, creating a sense of emptiness that caused many to focus on another ideal place. "In heaven, things will be better and we will finally be happy," echoes some of the same longings as, "I'm not a lonely stockbroker. Really. I'm a... uh...busty blonde named Karen42 who is very happy and gets many dates."

The medievalist's celestial ideal emerged from the fading Rome, but it became disputed in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when scientific discoveries about gravity and the Earth's orbit provided evidence for a completely material universe. Heaven couldn't be "up there," because "up there" was comprised of gaseous stars and atomic particles -- and a wave of rationalist philosophers made the old belief in a separate, floating soul seem silly and superstitious.

Yet, there are parallels between our new, postmodern techno-realm and the Enlightenment-era materialism which replaced the medieval cosmos. "Like physical space," Wertheim says, "this new 'cyber' space is growing at an extraordinary rate, increasing its 'volume' in an ever-widening 'sphere' of expansion."

What she doesn't discuss is the ways in which this infinite expansion might impact the way we think in the future. The medievalists conceived heaven as a specific, actual place; their schema was obliterated when the idea of a boundless physical universe left no geographical "place" where the city of New Jerusalem could exist. Now, the virtual realm's seemingly limitless non-material possibilities may replace our understanding of the world as being limited by our physical universe.

In several places, Wertheim attempts a guess at what this new era might eventually look like, and these are some of her weakest points. Her detailed account of cyber-utopia's future is rife with the sort of hypothesizing that geeks do on the bus, supplanted with quotes from William Gibson novels as 'evidence.' For example, her claim that "the idea that the essence of a person can be separated from his or her body and transformed into...computer code is a clear repudiation of the materialist view that man is matter alone" is, perhaps, dubious. Can the human soul be marked up in zeroes and ones? It's at best a debatable point, and in context proves unconvincing.

Wertheim is at her best as a careful historian. When she roots her arguments about cyberspace in the context of its spatial precedents, she's insightful and persuasive.

For example, she makes well the point that we are on the cusp of an entirely new vision of ourselves. For, "we are the products of our spatial schemes... a people who conceive of space in purely physical terms are virtually compelled to see themselves as purely physical beings." That model is changing as we simultaneously see ourselves in our RLs (that is Real Lives) and in many virtual selves and as we take on freaky MUD personae and connect with people who give us things that our RLs don't.

Wertheim observes that "if the self 'continues' into cyberspace, it also 'continues' through the post and over the phone....Cyberspace helps make explicit some of the nonphysical extensions of human beingness," and encourages a "more complex and nuanced conception both of ourselves, and of the world around us."

In other words, with this new space, we've been given a different way to conceive of the same old reality. The true nature of the universe probably hasn't changed since Dante visited Paradiso or since Thomas Hobbes declared that matter is king -- but our perception has. And those changes are going to continue to reflect both the spaces we create and the ways in which we inhabit them, until Judgement Day or Y2K -- whichever comes first.

Wertheim has proven herself an inventive historian, and "The Pearly Gates" well-illuminates the timeless longings behind our itch to log on -- and proves that everything old is eventually new again. Even with its rough spots, it's an insightful and worthwhile look at the ways in which the ancient relationship between self, soul and space is constantly being reinvented.

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In this new Internet paradise, the angels sing on MP3, St. Peter's got a Web page, and the city of clouds is suspended on a network of servers. Right now, you are basking in a tremendous, shining unearthly glow -- but it's not the luminous radiance of divine light. It's your monitor screen. Welcome to kingdom come.

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